So I haven’t posted in a while and now that my situation has stabilized, I finally feel that I can write it all down.

April 26: I announce my resignation to Hint Innovation

I had already been looking for a new job for a while, but none of the jobs were appealing to me. I was very picky for two reasons: I had excellent conditions at Hint and I’m a good developer which gives me access to many opportunities. A week before giving my resignation, a company I had never heard of contacted me through LinkedIn (through a recruiter). The conditions were fantastics, the pay great and I would have the opportunity to build and lead my own team of developers. When I received the offer, my job satisfaction at Hint was at all time low so the decision was quite easy.

Handing my resignation was harder than I thought, but I had to do it for both my sanity and my career. Hint was my first job, I worked hard there, had very good friends and many good memories with everyone including the founders (as I’ve mentionned before, I was the first employee so we were close). Fortunately, everyone was very understanding and my last weeks there went well.

May 16: I start my new job

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned the name of the company yet and there’s a reason for that. I didn’t ask enough questions during the interviews and the reality was an awful development environment lead by a tyrant CTO. My job was to kickstart a team of developers in Montreal that would be working with an established team in Florida. I was flown over there along with a web designer in order to learn as much as possible about the work to be done and familiarize with the team. We had two weeks to accomplish that, but we were had 2 meetings, totaling 2 or 3 hours max, and then promptly assigned a cubicule to work on our own. Any attempt to find out more about the application, the processes or the policies were met with anger from the CTO. Most other programmers appeared clueless about what they were working on and a lack of leadership and management meant that most of them could do nothing and no one would notice. The company scored at most 3 on the Joel Test and a big 0 on my own scale for a productive environment.

So I come back from Florida having learned approximately nothing and with little clue about what to work on. Furthermore, the servers were protected from access from other countries and any attempt to get them unlocked felt into depth hears. The last drop was the questionable endeavors of the company, probably legal, but not morally acceptable (in my mind), I didn’t want to be associated with any of it. That’s when I started looking and, fortunately for me, I was terminated along with the whole team in Montreal with a more than generous compensation package.

August 8 – September 9: My short stay at mConcierge

My search for a new job went well, lots of companies interested in my services, most of them have crappy offers or conditions, then comes mConcierge. Decent conditions, an interesting product and a great opportunity for career advancement. Somehow, I don’t feel right going into this job, I can’t quite put the finger on it but there’s something I don’t like about it. Since I couldn’t come up with a reason to turn down the offer, I decide to give it a try.

First day in, I have already done more than during my entire stay at the other job (1.5 months). Lots of work to do and enjoyable challenges. I’m doing good work but after a couple of weeks I still don’t enjoy working there. Part of it is the crappy desks and chairs I was given and the annoying office layout, all things I could have probably asked to change if I really wanted to stay, but I knew I wouldn’t be staying there too long because of that other thing I still couldn’t identify. I decide to quit for a second time this year.

September 12: The biggest decision of my programming career

I had talked with Code Génôme while I was looking for a way out of the USA job, but even though they liked my resume, they didn’t have a job for me at the time. At the beginning of September, they contact me offering me a job and presenting me with a big decision: either I stay at mConcierge, work on improving the environment and hope that the “thing” goes away OR try my hand with Ruby on Rails while accepting a sizable pay decrease (with an aggressive salary increase over the course of a single year, making me up to par with what I had with mConcierge).

Best decision ever!

I love working again, even though I’m not making as much money and I’m not yet at 100% with the new framework. I should mention that I was very curious about Ruby on Rails and had done some test projects on my own (see survvit), but I had never done a full fledged RoR app. I knew, however, that I liked the style of Ruby and Rails. So I took the job, I see the temporary pay decrease as my payment for the opportunity to learn a new framework and being happy at work. I went from programming with .NET on Windows to programming RoR on a MAC (although I feel I’ll be switching to Ubuntu eventually, I don’t like Mac OSX). I’m learning a lot and I think that’s my key to an enjoyable work environment: learning.

During my last months at Hint, I wasn’t learning anything useful, I wasn’t learning while at the job after that and even at mConcierge I was not learning much. Now I’m learning a lot and my productivity is increasing every day and many times I feel much more productive than I ever was with .NET.

• I was their first employee
• I initiated the move from CVS to Subversion (SVN)
• I initiated the move from SVN to Mercurial (Hg) (3 years later)
• I started the internal Wiki
• I helped integrate one intern and 3 full-time employees
• I worked on many internal libraries and tools still in use at the time of my departure
• I took a major role in the development of a dozen client projects often as the only front-end developer (while still working on the back-end and storage parts)
• I took part in countless design and architectural meetings and decisions
• I presented a project to a client’s client

Final thoughts

I’m happy with what I accomplished at Hint, I feel like I had a huge impact on how the company turned out. Hopefully, I can have the same impact at my new workplace.

The standard office equipment is also provided by them, including those unsuitable-for-office-work red chairs.

Fortunately, the chairs were eventually replaced by very comfortable ergonomic chairs (the Allsteel #19) and moved to a permanent office. The red chairs, however, have always remained in my mind as the symbol of the beginning of Hint Innovation and the company has gone a long way since then.

Last Friday, May 13th, I left Hint Innovation to go broaden my experience with a different company. As a token of gratitude to my former employers, I managed to acquire one of the old red chairs and gave it to them as a symbol of how the company started and how far it had come along since then.

Ever since C# 3.0 was released, I’ve been thinking about the possibilities opened by the extension methods. Extension methods allow developers to extend existing classes by providing them with additional methods. The beauty of this is that we can now create beautiful code APIs on existing classes without compromising its internal design.

You can learn more about the project by reading my post over at crossbrowser or by heading to its homepage hosted on Google Code.

Alright you say, this isn’t much different than most professional organizations, and you get to be a “real” engineer, that has to mean something, right?

What is an engineer

In Canada, most of the engineering jobs require the professionals to be part of the organization that is the Ordre des  ingénieurs du Québec, otherwise they can’t actually work. Being part of the organization means that the engineer has done the above tasks, is experienced and most likely competent. For example, only an engineer can approve plans for building various structures, this is called an “acte réservé” or an exclusive act. For sure, if one wants to do work that requires oneself to perform one of these reserved acts, doing what it takes to become an official engineer is a no brainer.

Being an engineer also has a couple of benefits, it can give you access to better deals at banks or a better cellphone plan, better insurance rates because being an engineer means that you probably have a relatively good income (good for paying debts) and that you probably have a good (or decent) head on your shoulder which means you take less risk than the general population, hence the lower insurance rates. There are quite a bit of other advantages to being part of the organization, but I won’t list them all here.

What about a software engineer

So why won’t I become a “real” engineer? Because there are simply no benefits for me. Most importantly, software engineers have no “reserved acts” (yet) which means I can work anywhere I want anyway. Secondly, I can already have access to all the benefits because I’m still part of the organization, simply not as a full-fledged engineer and most (all?) of the companies acknowledge my status as equivalent to being an engineer (better insurance rates, deals at hotels, etc.).

Another new issue that came up is that engineers will now be required to do a minimum of continuous education every year. I’m not saying that’s a bad idea, quite the contrary, but in my case, I already stay up-to-date on my own and since I’m not doing it through one of the official channels, that wouldn’t even count as continuous education.

Also, as I said earlier, it costs over two hundred dollars per year to be known as an engineer.

So, as long as there is no benefit to becoming a “real” engineer, I’ll remain a baccalaureate in software engineering.

[...] Now that we know what we have to build, we have to build it. This is a huge step and will most likely be where you spend most of your time. The first decision you have to take is how you are going to build it, what technology are you going to use with which framework. There are so many ways you can do it, you just have to pick one that suits you well. [...] The important thing to know is that you can build a working web app with any of those.

Web application development education is a subject that really interests me because I find it rather strange that a domain that is growing so fast is mostly run by people who learned their trade on their own. Sure, computer science and software engineering classes do help, but there’s a lot of ground specific to web development that they do not cover.

I think this is a topic that I will be coming back to quite regularly.

Enough now, go read my post.

They write code. Making it well-factored and clean is important, but other factors often take priority. Math skills are very much optional, but it does help to be aware of common problems and solutions related to the domain they are in. Communication and people skills are paramount. Process and team dynamics are bread and butter skills. They are consummate generalists without any truly deep specializations. They are expert at finding ways around problems and plugging components together to fulfill a set of requirements. In their personal time they are either trying to build the next Facebook, or engage in activities that have nothing to do with programming, developing, or computer science.

That’s pretty much dead on. I’m always thinking about useful new apps, tools, projects that would first and foremost benefit me, but that could probably be useful to a large group of people. I love working in a team where I can help others with my knowledge (and learn from them too).

Since I build web application, I can say that I am a web developer (with a specialization in front-end web development).

What about software engineers?

The post explaining the difference between different programing professions was lacking the software engineer definition, so I’ll take a stab at it.

A software engineer is part developer and part manager. He is taught the ways of programming without ever digging in deep enough to be considered an expert. The software engineer is also taught multiple software development processes which he can then adapt to the situation. He also knows the basics to managing projects which makes him a great candidate for future management positions after he has had first hand experience with software development. A software engineer is a manager in the making.

The actual act of programming is not the reason why I program, I do it for the results. That probably explains why I prefer to use high level languages that abstract most of the boring parts of programming and let me get from the idea to the implementation as fast as possible.

I don’t exactly know what I really am if I’m not a programmer. I really like creating web applications, thinking of new features or new projects that I could do, but I never look forward to actually coding it. I like playing with the markup, the styling and the client-side behavior (the whole front-end), but I hate programming what’s under the hood.

Any other programmers out there feeling that they are programming out of necessity instead of passion?

Next week, I’m taking it to another level. A high school student will be following me for a day (not much following to do since I work on the computer all day). This will not impact my work too much and I will be able to help someone experience first hand what his potential future career will look like, about 6 years before being able to get there.

Helping the future software engineers is something we, at Hint Innovation, and I truly believe in. We depend on what the education system builds, in terms of graduates, and as employers of future graduates, I think it’s important to be a part of that system.

Web development education is at a critical point, it’s mostly untouched by software engineering formations but most companies now need professional Web developers. There are places other than universities that teach Web development, but they don’t teach the same things as the universities. Both are needed, but currently only one exists.

I find the manifesto really interesting because that’s something I would like to do myself, at least partially. I love writing, teaching people new things, sharing my experiences. I say partially because I wouldn’t have anything to write about if it were not for my work, where I get to learn so much. I have so many project ideas, but I don’t take the time to even start any of those. After having read the manifesto, I’m a little more motivated, I need to answer 2 important questions raised in the ebook (he calls them “the two most important questions in the universe”):

1. What do you really want to get out of life?
2. What can you offer the world that no one else can?

Anyway, if you ever thought about going solo and working on your own, give this ebook a chance and read it.